Showing posts with label Anthony Aiello. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anthony Aiello. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 16, 2022
Murderous Boss of the Bonanno family posts $500k bail after violating his supervised release for meeting with Colombo family
The killer boss of the Bonanno crime family hid his face and refused to answer Daily News questions after he was released on a $500,000 bond Tuesday.
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn accused Michael “The Nose” Mancuso, 67, of associating with members of organized crime, violating the terms of his supervised release, which came after served 15 years in prison for his role in the 2004 death of mob associate Randolph Pizzolo.
“Don’t you have something better to do?” asked a woman standing with Mancuso in a park across from the courthouse when a reporter with The News tried Tuesday to question the Bonanno head honcho.
“Go cure cancer,” she added.
Mancuso did not respond to questions and hid his face behind his black leather coat.
He was not much more loquacious in court, responding only “deny” when asked by Judge James Cho whether the allegations that he had associated with other members of La Cosa Nostra were true.
Mancuso got caught up twice in federal wiretaps related to a separate investigation of the Colombo crime family, which resulted in 14 arrests, a law enforcement source told The News.
The 67-year-old Bonanno skipper has been out of prison for nearly three years after serving his 15-year stretch for helping carry out former Bonanno boss Vincent Basciano’s order to kill Pizzolo, who had botched a construction project for Basciano.
The hit man who carried out the killing, Anthony "Ace" Aiello, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a 30-year minimum term.
The feds say he twice violated the terms of his supervised release — in Aug. 2020 and again in June 2021 — by associating with organized crime figures.
Law enforcement officials filed a petition charging him with the violations on March 9, two days before his supervised release term was to expire.
Michael Mancuso, the reputed boss of the Bonanno crime family.
Associating with organized crime — though it violates the terms of his supervised release — is nothing new for Mancuso. He was already running the Bonanno family while locked up with five years left on his federal sentence, sources told The News in 2013.
Mancuso also served a ten-year state sentence for fatally shooting his wife in The Bronx in 1984.
He sat in court during the hearing Tuesday with his arm around the woman who snapped at the reporter.
His wife and two daughters signed onto his bond.
Mancuso’s attorney, Stacey Richman, declined to comment.
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-bonanno-boss-michael-mancuso-released-500-thousand-bond-mob-mafia-20220315-rd63gzsjljbl5e4d6agc4cztaa-story.html
Saturday, March 12, 2022
Modern mobsters turned to The Godfather movie for inspiration
A table for five at CaSa Bella in Little Italy in the late 1970s included a few mobsters, a girlfriend and the man they knew as Donnie Brasco, actually an undercover F.B.I. agent. There was business to discuss, but then the mood lightened.
“The restaurant’s strolling guitarist came to our table,” the agent, Joseph Pistone, wrote years later in a memoir. The girlfriend spoke up: “Louise requested the theme from ‘The Godfather.’” The guitarist obliged, and even knew the version with words.
Years later, in 2005, two New York mobsters were heard in a recording talking about a third man, Anthony “Ace” Aiello, who was under investigation in a criminal case. “Ace Aiello is like a Luca Brasi,” one mobster told the other, according to a court document. An agent seeking Aiello’s arrest helpfully added in a footnote: “Brasi was a hit man for the fictional Corleone family.”
And in 2018, yet another familiar reference surfaced in a wiretapped call between Joseph Amato, a mobster, and an associate who was set to become a “made man” in a secret ceremony the following day but was in fact a confidential informant. Amato urged the man to dress appropriately.
“You’re gonna look like Barzini, or what?” he asked, a reference to the sharp-dressing Don played in the film by Richard Conte. The informant chuckled, and replied, “Barzini.”
Mario Puzo, who wrote “The Godfather,” has said that the novel’s keenly observed depictions came from his meticulous research. But since the movie premiered half a century ago, this prime example of art imitating Mafia life has gone on to work in the other direction, too. Generations of mobsters have looked to “The Godfather” for inspiration, validation and as a playbook for how to speak and act and dress, as seen in law enforcement wiretaps and through interviews with some of the players themselves.
The infamous former mob enforcer Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, who has admitted to participating in 19 murders, was a young man just entering the world of mobsters when he first saw the film, and he took it as a sign that he was on the right path. “I looked up to them,” he recalled in a telephone interview, “even more than I ever did.”
“It was so true to life,” he said. “Not just the Mafia life, but the parts of being Italian, the wedding, the whole nine yards. It seemed like it was us, Italians, and our heritage.”
At first, the film was viewed as a threat to that heritage. Before filming began in 1971, Anthony Colombo campaigned to purge the words “Mafia” and “Cosa Nostra” from the screenplay on behalf of the Italian-American Civil Rights League, which had been founded by his father, the organized crime figure Joseph A. Colombo Sr. Fearing labor troubles and interference during filming, particularly in New York, the producers agreed.
But soon after the film opened, it was embraced by many in the underworld it depicted.
“Many wiseguys rejoiced in viewing the original film multiple times,” Selwyn Raab, a veteran writer on organized crime, wrote in his definitive tome, “The Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires” (2014).
“Federal and local investigators on surveillance duty saw and heard made men and wannabes imitating the mannerisms and language of the screen gangsters,” he wrote. “They endlessly played the movie’s captivating musical score, as if it were their private national anthem, at parties and weddings. The film validated their lifestyles and decisions to join the Mob and accept its credo.”
Mob relatives and associates, and mobsters themselves, have reflected on the way the film electrified them. In a memoir, Lynda Milito, the wife of a mobster who was killed in the 1980s — Gravano has admitted to being present — recalled her husband’s obsession with “The Godfather.”
“Louie got a copy and watched it like six thousand times,” Milito wrote in “Mafia Wife: My Story of Love, Murder, and Madness” (2012). She added that “the guys who came to our house were all acting like ‘Godfather’ actors, kissing and hugging even more than they did before and coming out with lines from the movie.”
Nicolas Pileggi, the author of “Wiseguy” (1985), the book that inspired the film “Goodfellas,” said that Henry Hill, the real-life mobster at the story’s center, once told him about going to see “The Godfather.”
Hill recalled piling into a car with the gangsters who were later played in “Goodfellas” by the actors Paul Sorvino, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci to catch an early screening. He told Pileggi he had “felt sort of enlarged by it” and that the movie “was about us.”
“These guys never really had movies that were made about them,” Pileggi said. “They had Edward G. Robinson, Bogart, Jimmy Cagney.”
“The Godfather” and other Mafia movies didn’t just depict the mob, they defined the mob for itself and provided visual and social cues, Diego Gambetta, a sociologist, wrote in “Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate” (2009). “How a real mobster should look, dress and behave are issues for which there is no optimal technical solution,” he wrote, noting that they “cannot for instance devise a company jingle and make it known to everyone without getting caught.”
“Movies,” he wrote, “can accidentally offer some solutions to these problems.”
“The Godfather” offered that and much more to the young Gravano, a boy born in the Italian enclave of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, in 1945. A tough kid, he was a member of a neighborhood gang called the Rampers before he joined the U.S. Army at 19. When he came home at 21, he found all his old Rampers pals had joined the Mafia.
A mobster told him, “You’ve got to belong to a family or you can’t do nothing. You can’t own a bar, you can’t own a club, you can’t do nothing,” Gravano recalled.
And so Salvatore Gravano became “Sammy the Bull.” And a couple of years later, in 1972, he saw the movie.
“I was stunned,” he said. The movie, and a father figure he admired in the Colombo crime family, put him on a clear path. “My dream was to become a gangster, to be honest with you.”
Gravano would eventually wind up in the Gambino family and rise to No. 2, the underboss to John Gotti, the boss of what was then believed to be America’s most powerful crime family. Along the way, he said, he sometimes found himself looking back to “The Godfather” for guidance.
One scene that stayed with him: when the Corleones sit down with an associate of another family to discuss entering the drug trade. Vito Corleone says no, but his hothead son, Sonny, interjects. Vito laments: “I have a sentimental weakness for my children, and I spoil them, as you can see. They talk when they should listen.” He then privately scolds Sonny: “Never tell anybody outside the family what you’re thinking again.”
That scene imprinted on the young Gravano, who said he had given versions of that order many times. “I would tell people: If you open your mouth, have an opinion to do something, they’ll know you’re a weak link,” he said.
He always related most closely with one character. “I literally see myself as Michael Corleone,” he said. “I was in the military, I came home and I went in the Mafia. I abided by the rules and regulations, I stayed quiet. I stayed a family man with my wife and kids.”
Gravano, who was so moved as a young man by a saga of the Mafia’s allure, went on to play a major role in the organization’s undoing. He became a cooperating federal witness and testified against Gotti and others in return for a five-year prison term and entry into the witness protection program. Gravano blames Gotti, who became known as the “The Dapper Don,” for the whole thing falling apart.
“Gotti, in his flamboyant ways, broke every rule in the book,” he said. “He did more damage to the Mafia than 10 people who cooperated put together. You never saw any Mafioso do what he did.”
Benjamin Brafman, a prominent criminal defense lawyer who has in the past represented defendants in organized crime cases, sees “The Godfather” as a postcard from the past. “It glorified an era I don’t think exists anymore,” he said.
Sammy the Bull would agree. Gravano left witness protection years ago and, turning 77 this month, shares stories from his life in a podcast, “Our Thing,” from a studio outside of Phoenix. He said that he doesn’t envy what passes for today’s mobster, unrecognizable to the Corleones. But he still thinks of the movie.
“Here I am, 100 years later,” he chuckled, “still quoting ‘The Godfather.’”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/09/movies/godfather-mafia.html
Thursday, April 21, 2016
Bonanno informant who turned down murder request from Vinny Gorgeous spared jail time
Joseph "Giuseppe" Gambina joined Team America more than a decade ago because he was marked for death himself for turning down the chance to earn his button by carrying out the 2004 hit on Randolph Pizzolo.
Gambina, 46, later testified against Basciano, who was convicted of Pizzolo's slaying and sentenced to life in prison.
“I am impressed by the courage Mr. Gambina showed when presented with the option of participating in a murder and becoming a member of an organized crime family, and not participating and possibly being a victim of an organized crime family,” said Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis.
“Mr. Gambina, you are one of the heroes of this sad, sordid saga,” the judge added.
Gambina may be best remembered for a photo of him and former Sen. Al D'Amato taken in the mobbed-up Giannini's café in Queens in 1991 that was proudly displayed on the wall of a Gambino capo Bartolomeo Vernace's social club.
Gambina pleaded guilty to participating in a hammer attack on a man and faced up to 63 months in prison.
Gambina’s cousin, Anthony "Ace" Aiello eagerly accepted the Pizzolo contract and is serving a 30-year sentence for the murder.
Defense lawyer Steve Brounstein said his client suffers from depression and “survivor's guilt from this horrible life he used to live.”
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ex-mobster-fbi-informant-spared-jail-time-article-1.2610168
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Basciano sentencing date set
Vincent Basciano will be sentenced officially on July 20th at 2:00 pm in Brooklyn federal court. The result will be a foregone conclusion: life in a federal penitentiary. He already has one life sentence so this will be nothing new. Basciano was spared the death penalty last week by a unanimous jury decision. By a 12-0 vote the jurors said life was the appropriate sentence. 10 jurors also wrote in a special mitigating circumstanec: "There are other members of organized crime that have admitted to an equal or greater number of serious crimes that are not facing the death penalty, much less incarceration." This was a sound rejection of the government pursuit of capital punishment, which even Judge Nicholas Garaufis had asked to not be considered in a letter to the government so time ago. Other mitigating circumstances supported by all jurors was the fact that the federal prisons could control Basciano, that Dominick Cicale, Michael Mancuso and Anthony Aiello were equally culpable for the death of Randy Pizzolo and don't face death, that Pizzolo voluntarily engaged in violent conduct and in a sense contributed to his own death.
http://tonydestefano.com/id3.html
http://tonydestefano.com/id3.html
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Vinny Gorgeous issued no kissing edict
He gave mob smooches the kiss of death.
After Vincent "Vinny Gorgeous" Basciano took control of the Bonanno crime family, he became so paranoid about the government that he ordered his underlings to stop kissing each other on the cheek, a mob associate-turned-rat testified yesterday.
Giuseppe "Joey" Gambina, testifying at Basciano's capital murder and racketeering trial, said he met the new boss for the first time on a Bronx street in early 2004 and promptly planted kisses on both of his cheeks, a traditional mob greeting repeated countless times in movies like "The Godfather."
But he was quickly rebuffed by Basciano.
"We don't kiss in public no more," Gambina, 42, said a suddenly bashful Basciano told him.
"The government's taking pictures," Gambina quoted Basciano as saying during his testimony in Brooklyn federal court yesterday.
Basciano currently has a new concern -- better lunches.
His lawyer, George Goltzer, yesterday pleaded with Judge Nicholas Garaufis, to allow his client more for lunch than the "one slice of bologna" he ate yesterday.
Goltzer -- who promised he'd pick up the tab -- asked for permission to get food from the court's cafeteria, rather than have the US marshals provide it. Garaufis said, "I don't think that's unreasonable."
Earlier, an FBI agent testified how the vain boss said he was glad they'd given him extra time to "get dolled up" for his mug shot when he was arrested in 2004.
"From what I read in the newspapers, you guys usually do this at 6 a.m.," FBI Special Agent Michael Breslin testified Basciano told authorities as they arrived at his home shortly after 9 a.m.
Basciano is on trial for ordering a hit on Bonanno associate Randy Pizzolo.
Gambina also revealed yesterday that a key Basciano lieutenant, Dominick Cicale, approached him around Thanksgiving 2004 to participate in the Pizzolo murder.
As Gambina recalled how Cicale told him that he'd get "membership" in the Bonanno family, Basciano could be seen with a look of disgust on his face.
But Gambina said he declined the offer because he feared Cicale had turned informant and was trying to get him arrested.
Cicale's plan had Gambina driving Pizzolo to murder an unidentified person. Then Anthony "Ace" Aiello would rub-out Pizzolo. Gambina declined.
After Vincent "Vinny Gorgeous" Basciano took control of the Bonanno crime family, he became so paranoid about the government that he ordered his underlings to stop kissing each other on the cheek, a mob associate-turned-rat testified yesterday.
Giuseppe "Joey" Gambina, testifying at Basciano's capital murder and racketeering trial, said he met the new boss for the first time on a Bronx street in early 2004 and promptly planted kisses on both of his cheeks, a traditional mob greeting repeated countless times in movies like "The Godfather."
BUSS STOP: Late mob boss John Gotti gives a Mafia peck to John D'Amato in a surveillance video. Vincent Basciano later banned such kisses.
"We don't kiss in public no more," Gambina, 42, said a suddenly bashful Basciano told him.
"The government's taking pictures," Gambina quoted Basciano as saying during his testimony in Brooklyn federal court yesterday.
Basciano currently has a new concern -- better lunches.
His lawyer, George Goltzer, yesterday pleaded with Judge Nicholas Garaufis, to allow his client more for lunch than the "one slice of bologna" he ate yesterday.
Goltzer -- who promised he'd pick up the tab -- asked for permission to get food from the court's cafeteria, rather than have the US marshals provide it. Garaufis said, "I don't think that's unreasonable."
Earlier, an FBI agent testified how the vain boss said he was glad they'd given him extra time to "get dolled up" for his mug shot when he was arrested in 2004.
"From what I read in the newspapers, you guys usually do this at 6 a.m.," FBI Special Agent Michael Breslin testified Basciano told authorities as they arrived at his home shortly after 9 a.m.
Basciano is on trial for ordering a hit on Bonanno associate Randy Pizzolo.
Gambina also revealed yesterday that a key Basciano lieutenant, Dominick Cicale, approached him around Thanksgiving 2004 to participate in the Pizzolo murder.
As Gambina recalled how Cicale told him that he'd get "membership" in the Bonanno family, Basciano could be seen with a look of disgust on his face.
But Gambina said he declined the offer because he feared Cicale had turned informant and was trying to get him arrested.
Cicale's plan had Gambina driving Pizzolo to murder an unidentified person. Then Anthony "Ace" Aiello would rub-out Pizzolo. Gambina declined.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Joseph "Big Joey" Massino secret recordings reveal delusions of grandeur
The Bonannos think they're the Corleone family, but not even Mario Puzo could have made up these clowns.
Based on recordings former boss-turned-rat Joseph "Big Joey" Massino made of his successor, Vincent "Vinny Gorgeous" Basciano, while wearing a wire, the "Godfather" character he and his crew most resemble is not Vito or Michael. It's Fredo.
"[Anthony] Ace Aiello is like a Luca Brasi," Basciano said, comparing the Bonanno soldier to the Corleone's loyal hit man, on recordings played in Brooklyn federal court yesterday.
"He's your Luca Brasi," Basciano said.
After playing the 2005 recordings, prosecutors asked Massino -- who made history Tuesday by becoming the first mob boss to turn rat on the stand -- if he was familiar with "The Godfather" movies.
"Yes, I am," he replied. Asked to describe the significance of a Luca Brasi, the man known as "The Last Don" explained, "If they sent him out to kill someone, he'd do it."
Aiello did, in fact, plead guilty to the murder of Bonanno associate Randy Pizzolo, a mob hit Basciano allegedly ordered and for which he now faces the death penalty.
The Bonannos share one thing with the Corleones: a flair for the dramatic.
"Did your wife get the money, by the way?" Basciano asks on the recording. "I sent your wife money."
Massino replied that his wife, Josephine, received the tribute from Basciano, which was stuffed inside a bottle of champagne.
"A bottle of Dom Perignon. $50,000. It came from Vinny," Massino explained on the stand.
Prosecutors played the recordings Massino made in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn to prove that Basciano ordered the hit.
Massino proved adept at drawing out evidence for the feds.
"Randy -- you OK'd it?" Massino asked Basciano.
"I gave the order," Basciano replies. "Randy was a f--king jerkoff."
Massino pushed further. "Did it warrant the clip?"
Basciano explained that Pizzolo went to meet a made man while carrying a pistol -- a major Mafia no-no.
Massino kept pushing Basciano to reveal more.
"I don't want people talking that 'we' clipped Randy. 'You' clipped Randy," Massino said.
Massino explained to the court that "we" means the family, while "you" means Vinny ordering it on his own.
"No, nobody knows that. 'We' didn't do it," Basciano answers.
"He's a f--king dangerous kid, who don't listen. He's just an annoying kid," Basciano said.
"These guys were out there doing whatever the f--k they want. I thought this kid would be a good wake-up call for everybody.
"People get killed every day. They gonna blame everybody in The Bronx on me?" Basciano said.
Basciano, along with his ex-wife Angela and two sons, showed little emotion as the recordings were played. But unlike everyone else in the room, he made a point of gingerly holding the earphones on the back of his head -- so as not to muss up his oh-so-carefully-coiffed hair -- instead of plopping the phones on top of his skull.
The full weight of Massino's betrayal is made clear in the loyalty Basciano showed on the recording.
"I'd go to hell and back. I made an oath to you," he told Massino.
Massino, who turned informant in 2005 after being convicted of seven murders and facing death-penalty charges on an eighth, complained Basciano didn't clear the hit with him first.
"Why didn't you ask me?" Massino asked.
"It was already in the works, bo [slang for boss]," Basciano said. "This kid though . . . this kid deserved it. This kid was a f--king thorn. He didn't listen to no f--king body."
Based on recordings former boss-turned-rat Joseph "Big Joey" Massino made of his successor, Vincent "Vinny Gorgeous" Basciano, while wearing a wire, the "Godfather" character he and his crew most resemble is not Vito or Michael. It's Fredo.
"[Anthony] Ace Aiello is like a Luca Brasi," Basciano said, comparing the Bonanno soldier to the Corleone's loyal hit man, on recordings played in Brooklyn federal court yesterday.
"He's your Luca Brasi," Basciano said.
THE FAMILY: Angela Basciano and her two sons at ex-hubby Vincent Basciano's trial yesterday.
"Yes, I am," he replied. Asked to describe the significance of a Luca Brasi, the man known as "The Last Don" explained, "If they sent him out to kill someone, he'd do it."
Aiello did, in fact, plead guilty to the murder of Bonanno associate Randy Pizzolo, a mob hit Basciano allegedly ordered and for which he now faces the death penalty.
The Bonannos share one thing with the Corleones: a flair for the dramatic.
"Did your wife get the money, by the way?" Basciano asks on the recording. "I sent your wife money."
Massino replied that his wife, Josephine, received the tribute from Basciano, which was stuffed inside a bottle of champagne.
"A bottle of Dom Perignon. $50,000. It came from Vinny," Massino explained on the stand.
Prosecutors played the recordings Massino made in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn to prove that Basciano ordered the hit.
Massino proved adept at drawing out evidence for the feds.
"Randy -- you OK'd it?" Massino asked Basciano.
"I gave the order," Basciano replies. "Randy was a f--king jerkoff."
Massino pushed further. "Did it warrant the clip?"
Basciano explained that Pizzolo went to meet a made man while carrying a pistol -- a major Mafia no-no.
Massino kept pushing Basciano to reveal more.
"I don't want people talking that 'we' clipped Randy. 'You' clipped Randy," Massino said.
Massino explained to the court that "we" means the family, while "you" means Vinny ordering it on his own.
"No, nobody knows that. 'We' didn't do it," Basciano answers.
"He's a f--king dangerous kid, who don't listen. He's just an annoying kid," Basciano said.
"These guys were out there doing whatever the f--k they want. I thought this kid would be a good wake-up call for everybody.
"People get killed every day. They gonna blame everybody in The Bronx on me?" Basciano said.
Basciano, along with his ex-wife Angela and two sons, showed little emotion as the recordings were played. But unlike everyone else in the room, he made a point of gingerly holding the earphones on the back of his head -- so as not to muss up his oh-so-carefully-coiffed hair -- instead of plopping the phones on top of his skull.
The full weight of Massino's betrayal is made clear in the loyalty Basciano showed on the recording.
"I'd go to hell and back. I made an oath to you," he told Massino.
Massino, who turned informant in 2005 after being convicted of seven murders and facing death-penalty charges on an eighth, complained Basciano didn't clear the hit with him first.
"Why didn't you ask me?" Massino asked.
"It was already in the works, bo [slang for boss]," Basciano said. "This kid though . . . this kid deserved it. This kid was a f--king thorn. He didn't listen to no f--king body."
Joseph Massino whined about wife to Vincent Basciano during taped talk
When former Bonanno boss Joseph Massino agreed to wear a hidden wire in 2005, he was beset with his health woes, crime family turmoil and a fed-up wife, according to recordings played in Brooklyn Federal Court Wednesday.
Massino, convicted of seven murders, was locked up in the Metropolitan Detention Center. He faced a death penalty trial for an eighth slay and the the feds were going after all of his assets, including the faux mansion in Howard Beach.
None of it was sitting well with his wife, Josephine.
"I don't know if I'm gonna get divorced," Massino confided to Vincent "Vinny Gorgeous" Basciano in a secretly taped prison conversation.
Not even a delivered bottle of Dom Perignon champagne with $50,000 hidden inside could appease his fuming spouse.
"She's on tranquilizers and she's got my daughters going out of their f------ minds," the mob boss said.
"She started Thursday night with the girl again," he continued, apparently referring to testimony about a goumada at his trial.
Meanwhile, prison life was wearing down Massino.
"I went to the bathroom 15 times," he complained. "The food is terrible. The shower is terrible."
The mob-style soap opera offers a window into Massino's decision to turn rat. The tapes are also a fascinating snapshot of the roiling tensions in the crime family after Basciano elevated himself to acting boss of the Bonanno family without consulting Massino.
Basciano was taking liberties with inducting new soldiers, promoting new captains and allegedly ordered the murder of associate Randolph Pizzolo, which he is now on trial for in Brooklyn Federal Court.
"I took 20 years to put this together," Massino counseled. "It's easy to take a life. I can take a life every day."
In a devastating admission, Basciano says on the tape that Pizzolo "deserved it."
Pizzolo's body was found facedown in a puddle of water on a desolate street in Greenpoint on Dec. 1, 2004.
Bonanno soldier Anthony "Ace" Aiello later pleaded guilty to murdering Pizzolo.
In their not-so-secret talk in the jail recreation cage, Massino questioned the wisdom of giving the contract to Aiello, whom he suspected of using drugs.
"Anthony Aiello is like a 'Luca Brasi,'" Basciano replied. "He's your 'Luca Brasi.'"
Prosecutor Taryn Merkl asked Massino to explain the reference to the character from "The Godfather" film. "He was a hit man, send [Aiello] in a direction and he'll kill for you," Massino said.
Massino, convicted of seven murders, was locked up in the Metropolitan Detention Center. He faced a death penalty trial for an eighth slay and the the feds were going after all of his assets, including the faux mansion in Howard Beach.
None of it was sitting well with his wife, Josephine.
"I don't know if I'm gonna get divorced," Massino confided to Vincent "Vinny Gorgeous" Basciano in a secretly taped prison conversation.
Not even a delivered bottle of Dom Perignon champagne with $50,000 hidden inside could appease his fuming spouse.
"She's on tranquilizers and she's got my daughters going out of their f------ minds," the mob boss said.
"She started Thursday night with the girl again," he continued, apparently referring to testimony about a goumada at his trial.
Meanwhile, prison life was wearing down Massino.
"I went to the bathroom 15 times," he complained. "The food is terrible. The shower is terrible."
The mob-style soap opera offers a window into Massino's decision to turn rat. The tapes are also a fascinating snapshot of the roiling tensions in the crime family after Basciano elevated himself to acting boss of the Bonanno family without consulting Massino.
Basciano was taking liberties with inducting new soldiers, promoting new captains and allegedly ordered the murder of associate Randolph Pizzolo, which he is now on trial for in Brooklyn Federal Court.
"I took 20 years to put this together," Massino counseled. "It's easy to take a life. I can take a life every day."
In a devastating admission, Basciano says on the tape that Pizzolo "deserved it."
Pizzolo's body was found facedown in a puddle of water on a desolate street in Greenpoint on Dec. 1, 2004.
Bonanno soldier Anthony "Ace" Aiello later pleaded guilty to murdering Pizzolo.
In their not-so-secret talk in the jail recreation cage, Massino questioned the wisdom of giving the contract to Aiello, whom he suspected of using drugs.
"Anthony Aiello is like a 'Luca Brasi,'" Basciano replied. "He's your 'Luca Brasi.'"
Prosecutor Taryn Merkl asked Massino to explain the reference to the character from "The Godfather" film. "He was a hit man, send [Aiello] in a direction and he'll kill for you," Massino said.
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